Thresholder

Perry felt the effects of the masks before he actually saw the men wearing them. His hand was slowed down, like it was moving through molasses, and he drew it back as if bitten, looking it over to make sure that he wasn’t injured. He had only opened the door out of the vestibule a small crack, and that was enough to let the effects of the masks in. When he opened the door a second time, he was more focused on the feeling, and swished his hand backward and forward, trying to get a sense of what was happening.

The magic depended on line of sight, which was because it was sight. The mask altered the perception of the wearer, and that perception became reality. In this case, it was a perception of speed. When he tried again, he could feel it catch his fingers, slowing them down to a fraction of how fast they’d been going, which made the energy flowing through them feel sluggish. He could almost feel the blood backing up at the border region as his pulse tried to push more through.

He had read about this effect, what he had termed ‘slow motion goggles’, but this was stronger than he’d been warned about, a nine tenths reduction of motion. He didn’t know how it was accomplished, but it was worrying. The upside was that with only a few exceptions — special blends of metals, mostly, the ‘godly ratios’ — the masks were indiscriminate, and would affect everything equally. A mask wearer would slow himself down if he could see his own weapon, and if he couldn’t see his own weapon, then it was likely that whatever he was attacking was also unaffected. And only a single mask could be worn at once, which meant that no other effect would be in play. Perry still had all his advantages, and while he didn’t think that he was a full ten times faster than the enemy, he doubted that he would need to be.

Perry held a knife at the ready, threw open the door, and charged.

He saw the long walkway to the engine room, which was hung with metal cables and open to the air, likely to save on weight. There was a place to clip in, but of course Perry had no clip. It was a relatively long distance, a hundred feet, the engines balanced against the passengers to distribute the weight. At the engine end, braced in formation, there were seven men in masks.

That at least gave the answer to how they were able to achieve such a powerful effect. They were laying on top of each other, the walkway not really big enough for two men shoulder to shoulder, let alone eight. Two were prone, another two were kneeling, with the last of them standing, and the whole arrangement looked quite precarious to Perry, who had time to take it all in given how much he’d slowed to a crawl.

He leapt forward and prepared to make a full sprint, but it was awkward to move so slowly, since his brain wasn’t agreeing with his body. He threw a second knife forward and watched it sail lazily through the air before veering sharply to the left, pushed with a hand motion by one of the men in masks who was standing further back from the others.

Six of the masks had owl motifs, or at least that of some kind of bird, traditional for the slowing effect, but two had masks like demons. They spoke to each other, though the words weren’t audible over the wind and the hum of the engines. They raised their hands, thumb and forefinger an inch apart, and began to squeeze them together.

Perry felt it as soon as they did it. They were trying to squish his head. It was a form of telekinesis, based on perception the same way that all the masks were, requiring the wearer to bend their mind and unfocus their eyes in order to push distant things with a finger or two. It was a game that Perry had done when he was a bored little kid, imagining that he was popping the heads of passersby, only this actually worked. The pain was excruciating, and if Perry was a normal man, he might have been debilitated and put down with a skull fracture. Instead, he didn’t miss a step.

He was halfway to them before too much time had passed, and the demon-masked men were conversing with each other in the clipped and precise language of professionals. Perry could see wide eyes beneath the masks. He was moving faster than should have been possible, and hadn’t been brought down by their attack.

With the next stride he took — more of a leap, really — they swept their hands to the side and threw him from the walkway.

Perry grinned as he fell. He was past the view of the masked men pretty quickly, which let him move at normal speed. With a wave of his hand, the shelfspace opened up, and Perry had his sword in hand to stall him moments before he hit the water.

The Caster above him was illuminated only by starlight, a squarish blob whose two main parts hung down like pendulous teats on a cow’s udder. As Perry tried to make a game plan, the engines went silent and the Caster was left drifting, which couldn’t be good. The plan, he decided, would be a simple one — kill all the bad guys.

He flew up from below, angling himself so he couldn’t be seen. The walkway had individual planks to give it some sway and motion, which left a thin gap between them. Perry pointed himself at the bottom of the walkway, flew up, and stabbed straight through the gap at one of the men laying prone. There was very little heft to it, given that the sword was doing its flying thing, going no more than thirty miles per hour with Perry flopping around behind it, but it was sharp, and the man’s belly was unarmored.

Perry swung himself around, twisting against the sword to get himself that last little bit of room, and grabbed onto the side of the bridge. Once he did, he was doing a one-handed pull-up, using the other hand to stab through the slats, piercing the belly of the other man, then just running the sword through, trying to get legs or whatever else he could. He caught some of the mask's effect through the slats, but it was muted, rolling over him in waves. He couldn’t really see them, and they couldn’t really see him, and not just because of the slats, but also the bodies of the dying that were in the way. They were all unarmored, and the sword slid through flesh like Perry was using some kind of demented glory hole.

Perry didn’t spend long down there, and used his free arm to swing himself around, airborne only briefly before landing cleanly on the walkway’s railing. He swung his sword with aplomb, slowed only slightly because they weren’t looking directly at him, and not the concentrated might they’d been using before. The telekinesis mask was a powerful effect, but was most effective at a distance, where perception could make it seem as though giant fingers were crushing a tiny person. Up close, perspective meant that normal-sized hands were slapping a normal-sized man, and Perry cut down one of the two with only token resistance.

Pieces of men fell from the walkway. Blood rained. The sword could go through bone without much trouble, and Perry put it through its paces. They had planned to make a stand and kill anyone who came after them, but everything had fallen apart for them the moment he’d shown up. Perry cut through a man’s head, and was mildly surprised to find that the masks themselves had no special durability. It was as easy as chopping wood, and offered no real protection to the face.

When they were all dead, Perry stopped outside the crew area, crouched down slightly so he couldn’t be seen through the porthole window. The fight had made a terrible racket, mostly from the screaming of the men he’d been stabbing, and Perry’s only hope was that the engine had been noisy enough on the inside that the commotion hadn’t been heard.

The masks were simple enough, and the men who’d worn them were journeymen, not experts at the height of their powers. March had said that maybe a third of the men had masks, which meant that Perry had dealt with roughly half of their number, and he was betting that they had put the weaker men on guard duty, hoping that strength in numbers would win out.

Perry had fought in the war on Seraphinus, and most of the orcs he’d killed had been the rank and file, conscripts who were fighting with minimal training and gear, raiders who were doing that because the alternative was being a dung farmer or a slave. Every now and then though, he’d faced someone who actually knew what they were doing, someone who had diligence and experience, along with better equipment. Those orcs had always been difficult to defeat, and Perry had come closest to losing against them. He steeled himself for something similar here, men in masks who better knew how to use them, who had more power, more training. The ones he’d killed would have been perfectly capable of murdering him if he were a normal man, and even getting thrown from the bridge would have made it impossible to catch up with the Caster. But that was just the start of things.

He took a breath and pushed open the door to the engine compartment.

He wasn’t met with anything but a lantern, a directional one that was aimed squarely at the door. It had a narrow aperture and was tightly focused, casting its foul light onto just the door, and Perry, bare-chested, felt his skin being eaten away. It took him only a few seconds to get past it though, around to the place where it wasn’t shining, and when he looked down at it, he realized that it had been converted from the machine that had been making loaves of egg in the mess hall. Perry closed the shutter on it and looked around. It was another vestibule, this one with no one in it, but he could hear shouting from further in. The Caster sounded silent without the engines running, and Perry hoped that they would be easy to restart.

With the trap disabled, Perry moved to the next room, keeping low to the ground. His chest was red and beading up blood, a few layers of skin removed, and he wished that he’d cloaked himself in nanites, even if it was ineffective as armor.

While Perry was crouched down, the door to the next room burst open, and a man with a sword came through. His mask was metal, not wood, a vastly more difficult material to carve with and only used by true professionals. The eyes on it bulged, a lens that gave more view of the surroundings, and Perry could feel it as soon as the man came through. Like the others, he was in workman’s clothes, but he had a proper sword rather than a long knife, an instrument of war rather than something stolen from a kitchen. Perry wondered how something like that had gotten on the airship, but they hadn’t checked luggage, only weight to make sure that the ship would have enough lift.

The mask’s effect was to make everything feel more solid and rigid, including Perry’s own body. It didn’t slow him down too much, but his skin bunched up less, and bending his joints felt awkward.

“Alright,” said Perry. The words came out funny, since the mask’s effect was gripping his throat. “What’s the plan here?”

“You were at the meeting,” the man responded. Perry had gotten some names, but he couldn’t match the build or the voice to a specific person. “You’ve come here to stop us.”

Perry wanted to barrel through and just kill the man, especially given that the crew were in danger, but he also wanted answers, and wasn’t sure whether those could be had from whoever was left alive.

“I have,” said Perry. “What’s the plan though? You have to have one. The king is dead, Berus is under the control of the symboulion, what’s a single airship going to do?”

“We’re taking it to Thirlwell. The war for the soul of Berus isn’t done yet, not while this insidious culture has yet to replace us.” The mask covered his whole face, partially muffling his words, but there was menace and pain in his voice. “There needs to be a refuge in this world, a place that remains unadulterated. A place where our gods can reign freely, where a man can be secure in what he owns. Do you know this to be true, or have you been poisoned by their ways in such a short time?”

There was a scream from beyond the door the masked man was blocking, and Perry lunged forward, the tip of his sword thrust out in front of him. He had hoped — thought — that it would pierce the man, but the blade gouged the clothes as though it had struck metal, and Perry had to raise his hand to block the oncoming sword. He was close enough to push the sword hand away, and he jumped backward to reassess.

“You’re fast,” said the man. “How do you move like that without a mask?”

Perry surveyed the damage. He’d pierced the heavy cloth and there was blood flowing freely from the wound, but it wasn’t enough to stop the man. The sword had reacted as though it was hitting metal, and that was this mask’s effect, making the world seem static. That the sword could still cut was a good sign, but the classic method of fighting against a man with a mask like this wouldn’t require overwhelming force, it would just need an angle of attack from a point that wasn’t being observed.

It was all well and good to read about martial arts in a book borrowed from the library, but it was another thing entirely to put all that theory into practice. There were a million things to consider about positioning, and clearly this guy knew them all. His back was to the wall, and the bug-eyed mask meant that he could see everything, including himself, Perry, and his own feet. There were no weak spots, no places that he couldn’t observe, and for a martial mask like this, attacking the mask itself would probably not work thanks to reinforcements.

Perry was a complete novice at fighting someone like this, but his sword was sharper than anything they had, his senses were keen, and he could move fast as a whip.

Perry’s follow-up attacks worked less well than the first one had. His opponent was an experienced fighter, moving with surety, and Perry hadn’t been in a proper fight since the Great Arc. Everything against Jeff had been dragons and mech suits, not two men with their swords and their wits. With every exchange, Perry could sense that his opponent’s confidence was growing, even in spite of the hits that Perry was getting in and the raw speed of grasshopper strikes.

The durability and stasis encompassed everything the bug-eyed mask saw, and that included both of them. There were different solutions to the problems that created, as no one wanted to grant their opponent a boon, but the easiest was simply to not be looking when you wanted to strike out. Watching closely, Perry could see the man’s eyes close just at the moment he expected his sword to strike flesh, though Perry was too fast for a hit to actually land against him.

After a few exchanges — Perry always dodging or deflecting, his opponent always taking the hits to his clothes or skin and never suffering too much for it — Perry switched his tactics. He had been trying to strike at exactly the moment the masked man had his eyes closed, but the window was tiny, almost as little as an eyeblink, and anyone who wore a mask and fought with it often would be well-prepared for that sort of thing.

Instead, Perry decided on brute strength. He simply went in, grabbed the hand that held the sword and narrowly avoided getting hit in the face, and lifted his opponent up off the ground. He’d have preferred to end things with fancy swordwork, but sometimes what was called for was bodily slamming someone into the ground and wrestling as though he knew a single thing about wrestling. The crash against the floor seemed to have little effect, as the mask had provided protection, but his opponent was left exposed, and Perry punched him in the spine with all the power he could muster.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you to watch your back?” asked Perry.

The body wasn’t moving. Perry had been hoping to incapacitate rather than kill, but he’d been struggling against someone who took hits like he was made of iron.

Perry took the mask from the man’s face, which took some effort, because it had been secured in place with straps that needed to be cut. The difference in build was too extreme for Perry to use the mask as a disguise, and the masks only worked for those who made them. Still, he stored the mask away in his shelf for later. It was tempting to put the body there too, just to get it out of the way, but having a rotting corpse among his personal effects seemed like a bad idea.

After a moment to catch his breath, Perry got to his feet and moved out of the vestibule. He was expecting more traps, but was met with an empty hallway. The section of the ship that housed the engines was smaller than the part that held the passengers, but it appeared deserted. Perry picked up speed. There would be another cluster of men somewhere, and either they would have hostages or be standing over bodies.

He found them in the lower section, all gathered together, four men with weapons, masks tilted up, and over a dozen more men and women on the ground, some trussed up but most just there because they didn’t want to get stabbed. A rolling door had been thrown wide open, and a cool breeze was coming in through it. No one was watching the stairway that Perry was on, because all eyes were on the open door and the man who was kneeling beside it at knife-point.

“Your life is forfeit,” said the one holding the knife. He had a mask on, but it was lifted up so it wasn’t on his face. The mask was blackened, but the design was hinged so that it could move down or away in a hurry — something not meant for longer periods. “The only two questions are whether you’ll admit to your crimes, to your indolence, and whether you’ll reveal what this airship carries.”

“It carries nothing,” said the kneeling man. His face was bloodied, and it took Perry a moment to realize that it was the captain, who regularly took his meal in the mess. He was in his pajamas, not his uniform. “Only passengers.”

“If that were true, it would be enough to condemn you to death,” said the man with the knife. His mask looked like it had been burnt, but Perry was certain that it had just been designed that way. In theory, you could get an effect from the masks that created fire, but controlling that fire would be difficult. Perry hadn’t read about anything like that in widespread use, but the library didn’t have much information on the cutting edge of warfare. It was entirely possible that what he was looking at was a state secret. “But the airship is meant to transport cargo, along with people, and the hold has been cleared out for more people, but I’ve studied this ship, and all the people don’t even come close to reaching the weight limit. So what is this airship carrying, if not the weight of cargo?”

“The cargo was meant to come by sailing ship,” the captain pleaded. “We went light to go faster, to save on fuel.”

“No,” the man with the knife replied. “The overriding impact on speed isn’t weight, it’s drag, and being lighter wouldn’t change much, not unless you could run high in the air. You’ve been low to the ground. There’s something massive, but we couldn’t find it, which means we’ve missed something. What are you bringing to the Kingdom of Berus? Where is it?”

“There’s nothing,” the captain said, shaking his head.

“Is it inside the envelope?” asked the man. “I would think not, because that would make it difficult to remove, but it’s the only place we haven’t been able to check.”

“If I knew, I would tell you,” said the captain. “All the food, all the supplies, they’re coming by sailing ship, everything we need to build, to keep people fed during the transition. I know you’re upset, that you think your country has fallen, but —”

The man moved forward and drove his knife into the captain’s cheek, which brought a cry of pain. He moved back into position almost as quickly and held the knife in front of him, ready to slit the captain’s throat at a moment’s notice.

Perry needed to intervene, he just didn’t know how he could do that without risking the lives of everyone in the room.

“I don’t think that Berus has fallen,” said the knifeman. “The king was assassinated, but a country is not its king, it is a system, a culture. You have ambitions to come into our country and kill its ideas, its customs, its dreams, even if you leave the people alive. Berus will fall only when the people accept your libraries, when they rejoice at the taking of land and liberty from those of noble blood. Transition is a slow process, they say, and it has not happened yet. Countries have resisted before, and we will ensure that in this case, it does not grip us by the throat.” He wiped the knife against his jacket, getting the blood off it. “Now tell me. What is this airship transporting? What is its secret mission?”

“It’s taking people, nothing more,” said the captain.

The man holding the knife cocked his head to the side, then moved forward and gave the captain a hard kick, sending him over the edge of the doorway and out into the open air.

Perry raced down the stairs, startling everyone, and tackled the man in the burned mask from the side, sending them both out of the doorway. Perry could only imagine the looks of utter confusion from everyone who’d been standing in the room, but he had no time for that, because he was soon flying. He saw the splash that the captain had made, but not the captain himself, and while Perry arrested his own fall with the sword, the man he’d shoved off the side hit the waves at speed.

Perry had done a lot of reading about jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge, not because he had any particular interest in doing that, but because he was arguing about something called ‘means restriction’ and went down the research rabbit hole in the interest of making a point. People found something romantic about jumping from a bridge, but the reality of hitting the water wasn’t so pretty. Jumping from that height and hitting the water was a death sentence, but it wasn’t an immediate death sentence, not most of the time. Sometimes people who jumped lost consciousness and drowned, which was the better of the two options in Perry’s view, because the alternative was to hit the water and break your legs or ribs and then drown while still very much alive to experience both the pain of a broken body and the panic of your lungs filling with water.

Perry aimed himself at the first splash, the evidence of which had already been erased by the waves. He wished that he had Marchand on for the dive, but Perry hit the cold water anyway and opened his eyes, trying to see through the water. It was impossibly dark, save for the gentle glow of the sword, so Perry swam down, trying to find the captain’s body.

He hadn’t gone too far before the ocean lit up. Perry’s eyes went to the source of the light, and could see it only indistinctly. The guy Perry had pushed off must have put on his mask, because the ocean was on fire, burning indiscriminately. It was just enough light for Perry to find the captain, who was unconscious, maybe dead, and sinking fast.

There was also enough light to see the monsters of the deep swimming down below them.

The Caster had been raining down blood and body parts thanks to Perry, unintentional chum thrown to the waters, and the size of the beasts hadn’t been exaggerated. It was difficult to see underwater, but the monsters were misshapen, with too many fins and bodies that curved in unnatural ways.

Perry swam fast, grabbed the captain by the arm, then kicked with all his might to get back to the surface. He was surprised by how easy it was to swim with someone else, his legs powering through.

When he got to the surface, he was met with fire. The man with the burnt mask had slipped it on, the fire was spreading everywhere he looked, and in the chaos of a hard landing his gaze was erratic and panicked. Perry held the sword in one hand, but it wouldn’t carry him above the water, not when dragging a body behind him. He made a split-second decision and opened up the shelf space. The water rushed in, knocking over shelves, but the captain went in with the water, and Perry closed the space behind them.

Perry knelt down next to the captain as the water rushed across the space. The captain had a pulse, thankfully, and whatever injuries he’d sustained were internal. Perry had only a vague idea how to do mouth to mouth or resuscitation, but the captain began vomiting after only a few seconds, saving Perry from having to make an amateur attempt at it. He carried the captain to a bed that had been acquired from one of the Kerry Coast libraries, and turned the captain on his side in case there was more to cough up. The man was breathing and groaning, but there was no time to explain.

Perry took a breath, steeled himself, and opened the shelf space back up for just long enough to step out. There was no fire anymore, but the monsters had come closer, and one of them, as large as the Caster’s passenger gondola, had risen to the surface. There was no sign of the man in the burnt mask — he’d either been eaten or drowned, or possibly drowned and then eaten.

Perry rose up with the power of the sword, moving back to the ship. He could see dark shapes moving below him, the monsters jockeying for a position to receive scraps from above. The one near the surface breached, pushing away enormous amounts of water, tusks or teeth sticking up at wild angles from a scaly maw before sinking back down into the water again.

The Caster had its engines off, but it had drifted with its own inertia and the winds, leaving him with a ways to go. The ship was silent and dark, and Perry angled himself back toward the engines again. The door was still open, and he could see movement inside. The sword was going to give him away, he was sure of that, and he’d have sheathed it, as he usually did when he was in flight, but the sheath was in the shelf space, and had been washed away.

Marchand had said that they intended to kill the crew, so Perry came in hot, throwing himself straight back into the room, wet from his dip in the ocean.

“Alright,” said Perry. There were four men, masks now down on their faces. He’d only been gone for a few minutes, and they didn’t seem to have killed any of the hostages. “You have two choices now: surrender, or die.”

Perry could feel their gaze on him, not just their eyes, but the effects of their masks. They were slowing him down and making his skin feel like it was made of iron, and there were four of them, knives out. Probably they had trained for this, with signals to each other when they wanted the others to look away. What they had been doing in Kerry Coast City was currently anyone’s guess, but they didn’t particularly look like spies. What they looked like were soldiers.

They were prepared to kill him to keep control of the airship. Perry didn’t know what kind of fate awaited them if they laid down their swords, but he didn’t think that he was about to find out.

He altered his stance, getting ready for the attack, and waited to see what they had in store for him.